The US House of Representatives defied a White House veto threat Thursday and passed a bill requiring US soldiers spend an equal amount of time at home as in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The move was the latest bid by the Democratic-led Congress to tie President George W. Bush's hands on war policy, and enforce troops reductions in Iraq.
The bill, which passed by a vote of 229 to 194, would ensure that soldiers could not be deployed to either war, unless they had enjoyed a rest period equal to the length of their previous deployment.
A similar bill, which critics say is intended to cut troop rotations and would lead to Congress and not US generals deciding the scope of deployments, failed in the Senate last month.
Bush has vowed to veto any kind of legislation that imposes what he calls artificial timelines for troop withdrawals from Iraq not dictated by events in the war.
Democrats now have a string of failures in their bid to get the president to accept troop withdrawal timetables, but have vowed to press on in an attempt to whittle away Republican support in Congress for the war strategy.
September is now looming as a crucial deadline for the US presence in Iraq, as it is then that General David Petraeus, the top commander in the country, and US ambassador to Baghdad will report to Congress on current strategy.
